Andrew Porter

Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novel, from Knopf, In Between Days. His short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Threepenny Review, Epoch, The Pushcart Prize anthology, and on NPR's Selected Shorts. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has received a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, the W.K. Rose Fellowship, and the Drake Emerging Writer Award. Currently, he's an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Trinity University in San Antonio. www.andrewporterwriter.com

photo credit: Chris Krajcer

If There's Something There

At the end of each semester, when I'm talking about revision in my classes, I always tell my students that they should never give up on a story out of frustration. If they lose interest in a story, that's one thing. If their initial impulse to tell the story is gone, that's fine. Those are both legitimate reasons to put a story to rest. But if they're giving up on a story simply because it's not working the way they want it to work, or because it's taking too long to revise, or because they're confused by what they want to do with it, they shouldn't close the door completely. Maybe they just need to put it away for a while. Give themselves a few months, or maybe even a year, away from it. But if there's something at the heart of the story that still interests them, that keeps pulling them back, that still haunts them years later, then that's probably a sign that there's something worth struggling for there, that somewhere, in the midst of all that mess, they might even find some of their very best work.